Julio Explains It All: Why We Need Carbon Capture for Climate

Carbon capture expert and Obama-era Department of Energy official Julio Friedmann explains—in under 3 minutes—why anyone who’s serious about climate should be serious about carbon capture.

Resources

Julio states that, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, says that if we don't have carbon capture we won't actually hit our climate targets. Seven of the eleven economic models they run can't get there without CCS and those few models that do, give us a solution which says that if we don't have CCS, it'll cost us more than twice as much.” You can read the full IPCC report, or check out the specific table he mentions.

When Julio says, “the best studies and the best estimates suggest that something on the order of 15 to 20 percent of global emissions are going to be handled by CCS,” a couple of reports show up in the background. Here they are in full:

• The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “Carbon Capture and Storage Technology Roadmap,” page 5;
• The IEA’s “Global Action to Advanced Carbon Capture and Storage,” page 5; and
• This report from the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

Julio brings up the fact that we don’t have many good options to address the 21% of emissions that come from the industrial sector, saying, “For a bunch of emission sources carbon capture is the only thing we know how to do. The industrial sector - we just don't know how to decarbonize that any other way. We don't know how to make a renewable steel mill. We don't know how to make a renewable petrochemical refinery.” You can find more details on the IEA’s “Industrial Applications of CCS” page. Also, this blog post from Columbia University goes into detail on how reducing emissions in this sector is especially difficult because it’s not just about replacing fossil fuels -- the chemical process of actually making cement releases CO2. You can also check out the Industrial Production section of our Carbon Capture Projects Map.